Why US Healthcare Falls Short

Why US Healthcare Falls Short (2:49)

The American healthcare system is currently dealing with a range of critical issues, from coverage to affordability of care. In this video, HealthMaker Rick Ferreira, CEO of Intralign, discusses some of the most pressing items and why they need to be

Read Transcript

The healthcare is in trouble, everybody that's involved in healthcare whether it's you and I as patients me as a seller or vendor to a hospital, clinicians we all have to act to behave differently because there's just not enough money for what we're doing here. I have an [xx] from Canada originally where the government is in charge of healthcare and is paying for healthcare and everybody over there complains about access, and here we have wide open access but we have very high costs, and I think the system is in trouble, things just cost too much.

I think the same thing around can be said around best practices but again in some countries again where the government is the payer, they're a little bit tired of controlling what the positions can do and can't do and mend this country or not. Hospitals are under pressure they save money and there's not enough people out there trying to get them to save money.

There's all kinds of people that walk in and say if you buy this from me, you should be able to save this kind of money. I had to battle with doing wellness and from an insurance standpoint is you could end up paying for it if I was currently insuring you today and you say that here's all these programs that are available to you to keep your weight down to quit smoking to exercise and then five years down the road you switch carriers.

I've just paid the offer for the carrier that takes you next he's going to then get the benefit from it. So that's why I think you don't see in theory, all those wellness programs should work, the problem is the number one question is who's going to pay? And there's a lot of great things out there reminding people to take their medications, check in their blood pressure, getting vital signs and back in at their doctor to be able to see, see what the results are, I think the challenge again always comes down to, who's going to pay for it.

The Affordable Care Act for me come again coming from Canada where everybody has insurance. I think it's, you want to be able to look out for the folks that need help, so being able to give insurance to those people in the path of running short of things, is a good pursuit. I think the challenge with the act was it didn't address the number one issue facing healthcare and that's cost, the act was really about coverage.

I think it would be the saddest happening in Newyork right where one of the exchanges was one of the teaching hospitals, it might have been NYU or Presby declined to go on that exchange, that particular exchange. So the whole emphasis of having these exchanges is because it opens up for everybody.